Some XHTML validators will fail many sites if title tags are omitted.

The title attribute can also be a useful tool tip for the user (who may not need accessibility) who needs usability tips (e.g: silver surfers - those new to the web etc) - Web sites have different designs (so inconsistent with each other) in particular hyperlinks underline decoration. Some underlined pre-rollover and vice-versa, so the title is useful where the default hyperlink CSS style may not be so obvious to some.

All your comments are mostly related to disability, which is understandable. For me - alt is for alternative for image - title is a tool tip in my experience.

I really want to make the sites I work on as accessible as possible
and having read this, I now know I have been doing too much. The
irony is that I had just coded a page with TITLE in every text link
and then thought I would check on it’s correct usage.

I am going to remove them now, even from images unless they are
absolutey needed. It would be good to have a check list to follow,
based on this article and not the W3C guideline, on how we should
be applying TITLE for humans and not some standards checker.

Currently (before my mass link TITLE mission I have just stopped)
I was under the impression that all images should have ALT. This
is to replicate any text on that particular image. TITLE should be
used to expand that description if needed. For example….

I have been in e-commerce for over 5 years now and during that
time the the ALT has always been needed and more recently the
TITLE has been encouraged, even though it has always been
there. One of the biggest things, based on the rules I thought
I knew is ‘Buy’ buttons. This is how I currently do it:

where BOOK TITLE is
the actual book we want to sell.

Based on this article I should have:

Is this correct? What about the LONGDESC attribute. Does this get annoying too?

Unfortunately we do have many links on our site that say “View
more” and this is where I was at before this article. I am now going
down the route of the invisible text next to these for better clarity
but any advise on the ALT verses TITLE on images would be a
great help.

If you want some help setting out a guidline for the use of TITLE I
would be more than happy to help.

Bim

This is often difficult to implement for content-led sites like those of magazines and newspapers, who often have a CMS that requires blurb text on a front page plus link text. If you have trailer text for ten stories on your home page, how many ways are there of saying “read the rest of this article”?

Some more web-savvy writers have asked if it’s OK to repeat anchor text if the TITLE text is different — glad we can deny them that get-out! If their CMS allows, our advice is usually to write intuitive, scannable headlines and make those the links — I’d say that convention is well enough established now that users don’t need a separate link (this is what BBC News now does).

Martin

Where TITLE attributes may be useful, is in providing a call to
action, or expansion of the link text. For instance a link to “Sport”
is self-explanatory, but can mean different things depending on the
sporting season, or the content being provided on the site. Here
the TITLE “attribute could be useful, identifying the sports being
covered. Then it would be explaining the “Sport” link, without
confusion or repetition, although the link text, “Sport”, is accurate
in itself. So there are winners, but no losers.

I do take your point on the width of text in our Blog though, and
thank you for raising it. We’ve started working on a way to get this
under control, and hope to have it changed in the near future.

Often there is a delay in deciding whether or not to follow that link,
so those few seconds whilst the “confirmation” of where the link
leads becomes vital!

There is one really peeving thing about _this_ page! Good readability
is limiting lines of text to around 12 to 15 per line. That provides the
ability to speed-read (with assimilation) and does not hurt the eyes
of people with reasonable vision have it badly hampered by trying
to follow long lines of text right across the screen.
…and No! resizing the browser window is _not_ an option.

Both the article and this page layout demonstrate excuses for not
putting enough thought into the design process. Expending a bit of
thought into how title texts are composed is by far better than just
leaving them out.

As a website accessibility feature, invisible text has long been accepted as one of the most helpful things you can do. This is text that is invisible on screen, but read out in screen readers, using CSS like the off-left……

Here are the links to the relevant information and downloads:

NVDA Project Home
NVDA Download
NVDA Documentation

Hope that helps as well Matt.

Firevox voicing plugin for Firefox, gives a reasonable simulation of a screen reader, or if you can limit your time listening to your site to 40 minutes, you could download the trial version of JAWS from Freedom Scientific. Not the 30 day download, the other one, it works forever but only for 40 minutes at a time, then you have to reboot before you can use it again.

I suppose when you actually sit back and think about it there isn’t a reason to see it online, other than that’s what people have always done! If people are that interested in the URI they can click on the link and get it from the browser….time for a change I feel.

In addition time to look for an open source screen reader, we are just in the process of rebuilding our test machine with more up-to-date browsers, etc. While it’s great to talk about these things I’m not sure I can fully appreciate it till I turn the monitor off and listen to what the page it saying.

Thanks again